GROWTH OF VACCINIA VIRUS IN HELA CELLS WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO THE PRODUCTION OF SOLUBLE ANTIGENS

Abstract

As one of the most convenient tools for the study of host-virus relationship, vaccinia virus has widely been used. As for the host earlier works have been concentrated on the rabbit skin, chorioallantoic membrane of embryonated hen's eggs or tissue culture of Maitland type. The first experiment by the use of roller tube tissue culture (Feller et al., 1940) showed that vaccinia virus could grow and continued to exist in high titer in the medium of the plasma clot tissue culture of chick embryo. The discovery of vaccinia hemagglutinin (HA) by Nagler (1942) has thrown a new problem on the growth of vaccinia virus, accompanying the production of hitherto unknown specific soluble substance, although it was found lately that some neuro-vaccinia and rabbit-pox strains and a strain of neuro-vaccinia passed through Ehrlich ascites tumor cells were devoid of HA production (Fenner, 1958; Cassel, 1957) . Recent works on the growth of vaccinia virus on the chorioallantoic membrane of fertile hen's eggs revealed that the initial rise in titer of inf ective virus was noticed from 8 to 10 hours after infection, being followed by a logarithmic increase thereafter. The first appearance of the measurable HA was observed after the lapse of nearly the same period (Oya, 1955; Metcalf, 1955; Maitland, 1956) . Recent advances in tissue culture techniques rendered monolayered cells available in the study of virus. As continuous cell lines, human carcinom HeLa and mouse fibroblast L have widely been used for cytological purposes and virus researches. Scherer and Syverton (1954) and Tyrell (1955) reported that HeLa cells could support the growth of vaccinia virus followed by the development of cytopathic effect. The formation of the inclusion bodies in HeLa cells infected with vaccinia virus was reported by Scherer and Syverton (1954) . As compared with HeLa cells L cells do not appear to be suitable for the growth of dermo-vaccinia virus (Scherer, 1952) .
The present work was carried out to get a more detailed aspect of the growth of dermo-vaccinia virus in HeLa cells, with special reference to the mode of production of hemagglutinin and complement fixing antigen, and their release from cells into medium. The mode of growth of the same virus in L cells will be described elsewhere.